Research Affiliates

Peter Chen

Prof. Peter Chen received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has held regular and visiting faculty appointments at MIT, UCLA and Harvard. He is the originator of the Entity-Relationship Model (ER Model), which serves as the foundation of many systems analysis and design methodologies, computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools, and repository systems including IBM’s Repository Manager/MVS and DEC’s CDD/Plus. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of the “Secure Cyber Space Center”, sponsored by Board of Regents of Louisiana, LSU, and Louisiana Tech University. The research focus is on enforcing cyber security using sensor networks. One of the objectives of this project is to perform research work to support the provisional Air Force Cyber Command in the defense of cyber attacks.

Louisiana State University
Disaster Science and Management Program (DSM)

Rachel A. Dowty

Rachel Dowty is a multidisciplinary scholar with expertise in biological and social sciences. She helped develop bioremediation and phytoremediation methods for responding to oil spill crises in Louisiana marshlands. Dowty also developed theory and methods to study culture at different societal levels (international, organizational, behavioral). She continues to apply these approaches to issues of stress and crisis mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. She has conducted ethnographic research on stress and decision-making amongst neuroscientists in Britain and the United States. Her post-doc work [National Science Foundation, Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) initiative] focused on how interacting organizational cultures during response to Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana affected groups’ ability to collaborate and communicate effectively. Her current research includes developing ways to assess and mitigate the effects of stress and trauma among caregivers and first responders during disasters. She actively continues her research and publications about how culture, politics, and history shape decision making in science, technology, and disaster management. Dowty uses and develops theory and methods to study culture at different societal levels (international, organizational, behavioral), and applies these approaches to issues of stress and crisis mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. She actively continues her research and writing about how culture, politics, and history shape decision making in science, technology, and disaster management.

Peter Kelle

Peter Kelle has been the deputy-head of the Operations Research Department of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Associate Professor with the Budapest University of Economic Sciences. He had several visiting appointments including a British Academy fellowship and a two-year visiting research position at the University of Calgary, Canada. Peter Kelle has been granted several prestigious awards including the ISIR Service Award recognizing the outstanding service to the International Society for Inventory Research.

Mary Lou Kelley

Mary Lou Kelley has been an LSU faculty member in the Psychology Department since 1982. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Dr. Kelley and her research team of ten graduate students and colleagues were determined to obtain for evaluating children’s psychological adjustment post-Katrina. Within three months after Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Kelley and her colleagues and students wrote and received a NIMH grant for following Katrina victims for two years. Several articles studying variables related to children’s adjustment after Katrina are in press. Additionally, Dr. Kelley recently received a grant from the Deparment of Homeland Securities to continue to follow a select group of the NIMH participants and expand the assessment of these victims. Dr. Kelley has presented her work nationally and internationally.

Director
Regulatory Affairs
HLA,LLC & PPM Consultants

Harold Leggett, PhD

Dr. Leggett has more than 25 years of professional and consulting experience in regulatory and governmental affairs, compliance management, EHS management, environmental compliance, emergency response and management, strategic planning and implementation, health and safety compliance, PSM, natural resource management and assessment, NEPA and FERC coordination and compliance assessment. Dr. Leggett’s brings unique professional knowledge, experience and perspective having been gained from employment in industry (Forest Products and Interstate Natural Gas Pipeline companies), regulatory (La Dept of Environmental Quality and US Navy- Industrial Hygiene) and consulting engineering firms.
In addition, Dr. Leggett has been a member of the Unified Command Group (UCG) for the State of Louisiana and has served as lead contact between the state and federal agencies for emergency response and environmental and debris management recovery activities following Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike.
He has served on numerous task force and appointments to develop and implement comprehensive environmental regulations for Louisiana and the United States. Dr. Leggett has presented numerous presentations, white papers and position publications on the impact of environmental rules and regulations on Louisiana. Recently, Dr. Leggett has had a publication accepted for publication in the May/June issue of the Environmental Forum Journal which discusses the impact of environmental policy on economic and business interest in the United States.
Dr. Leggett served as Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality from January 2008 to January 2010. Prior to that, he served as the Assistant Secretary of the same department. Other duties include Senior Environmental Engineer of the Gulf South Pipeline Company, Senior Manager of HLA, LLC., Senior Environmental Engineer for Georgia-Pacific Corporation, Biologist for Gulf South Research Institute and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and Environmental Program Specialist for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.
Dr. Leggett holds a B.S. in Agriculture and a M.S. in Biology from Southeastern Louisiana University and a PhD in Biology from the University of Southern Mississippi.

Rebecca S. McConnico

Rebecca McConnico is a veterinarian specializing in equine internal medicine and has been a faculty member at the School of Veterinary Medicine – Louisiana State University since 2000. She is presently an associate professor. In addition, she is the director of the Equine Health Studies Program Emergency & Disaster Management Team and is the Equine Branch Director of the Louisiana State Animal Response Team. She was an active leader in the Louisiana response to storm-affected horses during the fall of 2005. She has remained active in emergency preparedness and planning for the state and nation. She was instrumental in developing the equine evacuation and response plan for Louisiana with the Louisiana Dept. of Agriculture & Forestry. This plan is updated yearly and is now being used as a template by other states in the development of respective state plans.

Associate Director
Louisiana State University
National Center for Biomedical Research and Training
Phone: 225-578-2366

Michael Moody

Michael Moody is the Associate Director, Research and Development, of the National Center for Biomedical Research and Training at LSU. He is also a professor at the LSU Agricultural Center and LSU International Programs. He has a 32 year career with LSU and served as Head of the Department of Food Science. He is an Institute of Food Technologists Fellow. Research interests and responsibilities include food and drug law, domestic and international food safety, seafood technology, and food defense. He served in the United States Army Reserves for 31 years and retired as a full Colonel. In that capacity, he was DOD’s Emergency Preparedness Liaison Officer (EPLO) for the state of Louisiana for five years

Suzanne D. Pawlowski

Suzanne Pawlowski is a former Associate Professor in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department at LSU (now retired). She holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Information Systems from Georgia State University and an MBA in Management and B.A. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on knowledge processes, knowledge management and learning in teams, organizations and ad hoc knowledge networks in disaster response. Her professional experience includes a 20-year career in IT as an application developer and manager of application development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Tracey Rizzuto

Tracey Rizzuto, an assistant professor in the LSU Department of Psychology, received her Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Pennsylvania State University. Her research interest is in attitudinal and behavioral responses to large-scale organizational change, including workplace disasters and technology implementation. She has also taken an active role in promoting workplace disaster recovery services through the Katrina Aid and Relief Effort (KARE) and the Disaster Research Team (DRT), inter-divisional committees of the American Psychological Association.

Sudipta Sarangi

Sudipta Sarangi received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech and has been at the Economics Department at LSU since 2000. His research interests are primarily in the area of network theory. He is also interested in experimental economics and development economics. He is currently involved in two projects Department of Homeland Security projects. The first project examines how risk attitudes of individuals in disaster prone areas differ from those who do not live in such areas. The second project focuses on networks aspects and their relations to disasters. His funded research includes grants from the NSF, NIH and DARPA.

Helmut Schneider

Helmut Schneider received his Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin. He taught statistics at the Free University in Berlin from 1978 to 1983. He visited the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. In the Fall of 1985, Professor Schneider joined the College of Business Administration, now called the E. J. Ourso College of Business. Since 1994 he has been the chairman of the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department at Louisiana State University. He has published two books and over 50 articles in refereed journals and is a member of several professional organizations including the Association for Information Systems, the Information Systems Audit and Control Associations, the American Statistical Association and the American Society for Quality. He teaches courses in quality management, systems auditing and statistics.

Dek Terrell

Dek Terrell is the Freeport-McMoran Corporation Endowed Chair of Economics at Louisiana State University and the director for LSU’s Division of Economic Development. Terrell teaches Economic Principles and Problems, Economic Forecasting, Financial Econometrics and Econometric Methods. His research interests include econometrics and Bayesian Econometrics. Terrell’s current research grants include work with the Louisiana Department of Economic Development, Department of Health and Hospitals, Louisiana Workforce Commission, USDA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

After earning his B.S. from Millsaps College in 1986, Terrell received his M.A. from Duke University in 1988, before obtaining his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1991. His efforts have been instrumental in the production of the Louisiana Economic Outlook for the past three years, a report often referenced and consulted for its forecasts of economic conditions for Louisiana and the eight large metropolitan statistical areas of New Orleans, Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Houma, Alexandria, Shreveport-Bossier and Monroe.

Robert R. Twilley

Dr. Twilley is Executive Director of Louisiana Sea Grant College and professor in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Science at LSU. He has been a Distinguished Professor in Louisiana Environmental Studies at LSU in 2005, and served in several administrative capacities including Associate Vice Chancellor of Research and Economic Development from 2007 to 2010, and Director of the Wetland Biogeochemistry Institute from 2004 to 2007. In 2010, Dr. Twilley served for two years as Vice President of Research at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, which manages the UL Research Park and $70 million research enterprise. He earned the UL Lafayette Foundation’s Distinguished Professor Award in 2000, where he was a professor in biology from 1986 to 2004. He is the founder of the Coastal Sustainability Studio at LSU in 2009, and also founded the Center for Ecology and Environmental Technology (CEET) at UL Lafayette in 1999. Most of Dr. Twilley’s research has focused on coastal wetlands both in the Gulf of Mexico, throughout Latin America, and in the Pacific Islands. Dr. Twilley has published extensively on wetland ecology, global climate change, and has been involved in developing ecosystem models coupled with engineering designs to forecast the rehabilitation of coastal and wetland ecosystems.

James R. Van Scotter

James R. Van Scotter (Ph.D., University of Florida) is an Associate Professor of Information Systems and Decision Sciences at the Louisiana State University. His research on individual and group performance, computer mediated-communication, and e-commerce has been published in Decision Sciences, Organization Science, the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Information and Management, Personnel Psychology, and Business Ethics Quarterly. He is a member of the Association for Information Systems, INFORMS, the Academy of Management, and the Southern Management Association. He held numerous positions in Air Force transportation and logistics before retiring at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 1998.

Fahui Wang

Fahui Wang is Department Chair of Geography and Anthropology and director of Chinese Culture and Commerce at Louisiana State University. He earned his B.S. in economic geography from Peking University (1988), and M.A. in economics (1993) and PhD in city and regional planning (1995), both from the Ohio State University. His research interests include transportation planning, mitigation and socioeconomic impacts related to disasters with research methods such as GIS, spatial analysis, and computational methods.

Chester Wilmot

Chester Wilmot is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Louisiana State University, and Program Manager of Special Studies at the Louisiana Transportation Research Center. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering at Pretoria University in South Africa in 1988, a Master’s degree in transportation engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972 and a Ph.D in transportation engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in 1983. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the state of Louisiana, and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The main thrust of his research in the last five years has been in evacuation demand modeling. During this period, he has developed a time-dependent evacuation demand model that can be used to test alternative policies and operational strategies, investigated alternative models of evacuation destination choice, and developed a procedure to establish hurricane evacuation zones. He is currently investigating alternative methods of collecting data on evacuation behavior.

Brian Wolshon

Dr. Brian Wolshon, PE, PTOE, is the Edward A. and Karen Wax Schmitt Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Louisiana State University as well as the Director of the Gulf Coast Center for Evacuation Transportation Resiliency. He specializes in the field of highway design and traffic engineering. His research covers several areas in highway transportation, most notably the operational analysis of traffic flow under various emergency and major event conditions. Over the decade he has been focused on issues related to the planning and management of traffic during mass evacuations, most notably the application use of reversible traffic operations and the real-time acquisition and management of road-weather information.

Dr. Wolshon has authored scores of research papers, technical articles, and book chapters; and has served as an expert on numerous panels and committees for the Federal Highway Administration, National Academies of Science and Engineering, the Transportation Research Board, Institute of Transportation Engineers, and American Society of Civil Engineers. In 2000, he founded and continues to chair theTransportation Research Board Subcommittee on Emergency Evacuation in an effort to create a national focal point for the dissemination of transportation-based evacuation research information. He has worked as a consultant to the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development on the development of the state’s highly acclaimed regional evacuation traffic management plan – for which he was later awarded the Louisiana Engineering Society’s 2008 James M. Todd Technical Accomplishment Medal. He also works in collaboration with the Sandia National Laboratories (where he recently completed a sabbatical appointment) and the National the Los Alamos National Laboratory to develop regional micro-scale evacuation traffic models of various metropolitan regions.